BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL 221
exploring the physical interaction between the human body and other
physical objects, and trying to identify how this interaction affects us.
However, once we shift to a transcendental perspective, we realize that in
doing this, we only describe ourselves and the physical objects affecting
us as they appear, that is as appearances. Considered transcendentally,
what we describe is nothing but representations. In these representations
we may distinguish between their a priori form, which according to the
theory is supplied by ourselves, and their content, which according to the
theory is produced by the affection of the mind.
Now, what is this affection of the mind? How does it take place? If we
are to answer this question from a transcendental perspective, it seems
that we cannot answer it by referring to the affection that we observe
empirically. If we did this, we would end up with a circular explanation.
We would then explain the empirical content of our representations by
referring to the very same representations the theory was supposed to
explain. 11 In order to avoid this circularity, it seems we have no other
option but to seek the source of the affection of the mind outside the
representational domain, that is in the domain of the things in
themselves.
This also seems to be Kant's idea, for instance at A 494/B 522, where
he states:
The sensible faculty of intuition is really only a receptivity for being
affected in a certain way with representations, whose relation to one
another is a pure intuition of space and time (pure forms of our
sensibility), which, insofar as they are connected and determinable in
these relations (in space and time) according to laws of the unity of
experience, are called objects. The non-sensible cause of these
representations is entirely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot
intuit it as an object; for such an object would have to be represented
neither in space nor in time (as mere conditions of our sensible
representation), without which conditions we cannot think any
intuition. Meanwhile we can call the merely intelligible cause of
appearances in general the transcendental object, merely so that we
may have something corresponding to sensibility as a receptivity. (A
494/B 522, my emphasis)
In this passage the affection of the mind is claimed to be produced by a
non-empirical cause, here called ‘the transcendental object’. This non-
11
That is, the theory was supposed to explain a certain aspect of this experience,
what Kant calls its matter.